ActiveVideo seems to be enjoying more and more success among top tier US cable companies and has signed up Charter, to go with its existing Cablevision customer. It also said this week that it is partnering with Sumitomo, a Japanese conglomerate best known for its banking successes internationally, to push the product in Japan.
Sumitomo is known to have a holding in JCOM, the Japanese MSO that was once owned by Liberty Global, with control lying with KDDI, which also owns Cablenet. So KDDI controls around 8.3 million cable homes and tries to offer a quad Play to these, up against the Japanese incumbent Telco NTT, which has pay TV dominance in a market of 49 million homes.
But these wins have come for a reason, and the roadmap and capabilities of ActiveVideo is what’s driving this. One of the hurdles that MSOs have to get over is how to introduce an advanced UI, across multiple device types, without having to change their entire set top footprint overnight, and the new version of ActiveVideo solves this.
The way it does this is to create what is effectively an HTML 5.0 browser on a device which is both underpowered and never designed to offer that. It achieves this by putting much of the processing into the cloud, and then rolling down the mapped image to a traditional TV browser, this creates a set top that can run brand new UIs, which includes the ability to run Apps, even though they run transparently in the cloud.
This is the second time that we have come across this idea, and it is an idea that has found its time. Tiny Israeli start up Tversity was showing its Cloud Browser at IBC last September, aimed precisely at companies with a body of old set tops. There are a number of HTML 5 announcements in this weeks’ Worth Noting section, which rely on the same need.
CEO Ronen Mizrahi told us at the time that this would help pay TV companies take YouTube away from the smart TVs of this world and give it, in its new HTML 5 format, to any old set top. This will be critical if anyone wants to put the new HTML 5 formatted paid channels of YouTube on old set tops.
He explained that you need a more capable Javascript engine, plus upgraded GPU and 3D acceleration to show full HTML 5 and there will be plenty of devices out there that just can’t be upgraded. The Tversity version also comes alongside its other great invention called Airflinger, a way of moving video from a tablet or Smartphone to a set top driven TV and back again, purely in software.
ActiveVideo has clearly seen the same opportunity and we think this has come about because of developments like the Horizon Project of Liberty Global. This was implemented so that a new dynamic UI could be put on both a TV set top and a tablet, and they could look the same, work together and also pass video between the two screens.
Tversity might have a bit of a beef that its cloud browser being copied, but perhaps this was an idea of its time ‘ and if any specialist TV person looked at this problem, they would come up with the same hybrid cloud approach.
Tversity has had some design wins at Israel’s Yes, Bouygues Telecom in France and Videotron in Canada, so these products are also finding the light of day among tier one players. We asked ActiveVideo if it had actually borrowed the idea from Tversity or even licensed the product, but they told us that although they were aware of Tversity, this was an entirely in-house written project that had been on the roadmap for some time.
That having been said no-one seems to have realized that this will give all the companies looking at this type of solution a reason NOT to upgrade to at least one generation of set tops. And if an MSO like Charter can add apps and go to HTML 5 with a new UI, without changing one piece of hardware, there is going to be a massive hole in the order books of set top companies going forwards over the next couple of years.
It is true that other new capabilities, and a controlled replacement approach to set tops will still continue, so they won’t die completely, but it will mean that many new set tops will manage without any upgrade in power, something that recent devices designs were almost certainly relying on. And once companies like Charter, and the previous customer Cablevision, as well as customers like Ziggo in the Netherlands, another ActiveVideo client, go down this route, then everyone will become aware of what can be done using the cloud and more will follow.
ActiveVideo has demonstrated to our satisfaction that cloud based versions of their software eliminate latency to the extent that you can play Sony Playstation class cloud games on virtually any device. Remember that ActiveVideo bought the remnants of OnLive also, so now has a cloud gaming arm as well.
Asking an MSO if they want to add something powerful enough to play PlayStation games on, that also lets them update their UI dynamically, on equipment that they already have installed, for almost nothing, is going to get your salesman’s arm ripped off, and anyone that can do this will sweep through the industry like wildfire. Anyone who cannot afford to go to TiVo and buy its boxes, or to NDS (and wait a few years) to have an Horizon type device installed, will HAVE to go down the cloud route or be left behind.
ActiveVideo said that other advances to its new CloudTV H5 platform include the ability to retrofit recommendations and rich media applications. It can render complex UIs with animation, and has what it calls smart multiplexing, to increase the number of CloudTV sessions that can be sent compared to its earlier version. It can even deliver the same rendering to two devices at once in different screen resolutions, without sending two versions of the rendering.
The system claims to be built on an ultra-light code base, dubbed CloudTV Nano, CloudTV Nano Lite and CloudTV Nanoware, and these clients are designed to work in any conditions on the internet, presumably including cellular delivery formats.
Jim Blackley, executive vice president of engineering and IT, Charter Communications said in a prepared quote, ‘This technology enhances platform and network scalability, while delivering a balanced architecture on which cloud and client interactions can be optimized. Early tests have shown favorable results and the next step is an in-market trial.”
Anyone out there who is trying to forecast set top sales for the next five years needs to cross off most of the sales they had penned into these accounts, and the list will only get longer.